Burton, Mary Agnes (editor). Journal of Pontiac's Conspiracy 1763. (Detroit: Published by Clarence Monroe Burton under the Auspices of the Michigan Society of the Colonial Wars, [1912]).

Pages/Illustrations:

245 / 3

Citable URL:

www.americanjourneys.org/aj-135/

Author Note

The authorship of this journal is uncertain. It was written
in French by one of the besieged captives inside the fort at
Detroit in 1763. The editor of the 1912 edition suggested the
author may have been one of the Catholic clergy stationed there;
a later editor speculated it may have been a trader or other
unlucky visitor caught up in these dramatic events.

Pontiac’s Alliance and the Siege of Detroit

Throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century, France, and
England battled for control of North America. The French had
settled the interior of the continent in a two-thousand-mile arc that
stretched from Quebec in the northeast through the Great Lakes
and down the Mississippi Valley to New Orleans. They wanted to
convert the Indian inhabitants to Catholicism and trade with
them for furs. The English, meanwhile, had colonized 1,500 miles
of the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Georgia, and were on the
verge of pushing across the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio and
Kentucky. They wished to drive the Indian inhabitants further
west and to build farming towns and plantations. Native American
nations, from the Creeks and Cherokee in the south through the
Delaware and Shawnee in the middle to the Iroquois and Ottawa in
the north, were pressed between these two opposing forces. Some
Indians sided with the French, some with the English, some
switched sides as circumstances demanded, and many tried
unsuccessfully to stay neutral.

The English won. After years of uninterrupted warfare,
British forces captured Montreal in 1760 and the French
surrendered Canada and the interior to England. French forts in
the lakes and Mississippi Valley were handed over to the English
officers, and French traders gave control of their businesses to
British merchants.

The Indian nations west of New York had generally sided with
the French and many saw no reason to accept English domination
without a fight, especially since they were not represented at
the peace treaty. Ottawa Chief Pontiac (1720?-1769) was the
leading figure in a pan-tribal resistance that opposed the
English, and by June 1763 had destroyed all the forts west of
Niagara except Detroit. From June to November1763 superior
Indian forces from across the region surrounded the outnumbered
British soldiers and residents at the fort, cutting off
communication and food. When, much to his disappointment, the
French did not support Pontiac’s resistance, he withdrew. He
moved west to Ohio and Illinois, where he was later killed by
rival Indians. His accomplishments were celebrated in a popular
English play in the late eighteenth century and in the widely read
history, TheConspiracy of Pontiac, by Francis
Parkman, during the nineteenth.

Document Note

The manuscript of this document is said to have been
discovered in the early nineteenth century when an old house in
Detroit was being torn down. It was given to the fledgling
Michigan Historical Society in 1838, translated and published in
1854, and then disappeared again. It was re-discovered in 1905
on the floor of an abandoned home in Ecorse, Michigan, and
bought by collector Clarence M. Burton. He gave it to the
Detroit Public Library after overseeing the French and English
edition presented here; only one hundred copies of this book were
printed.

Additional primary sources are printed in Milo Quaife, ed.,
The Siege of Detroit in 1763, the Journal of Pontiac’s
Conspiracy and John Rutherford's Narrative of a Captivity
(Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1958), and in volume viii (1886) of
the Michigan State Pioneer Society’s Collections. The
best modern account is in Richard White’s The Middle Ground:
Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region
1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).